• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • We are all the addict, because we all want the relative luxuries, conveniences, and comforts of a “middle class,” or higher, modern life. I’m no exception. But, the relative good life that is afforded to many in the modern world is heavily connected to fossil fuels.

    As living standards have increased over the past few centuries, so has fossil fuel use. And the connection between the two is not arbitrary. The relatively high living standards of a modern, middle class lifestyle require a relatively high amount of energy. Fossil fuels are very energy dense. We need energy, fossil fuels contain a lot of energy, it’s not terribly complicated.

    A lot of people posit that a modern middle class lifestyle is possible without getting any energy from fossil fuels. That would be great if true, but it is a yet unproven hypothesis. It’s entirely possible that an end to fossil fuel use also means an end to at least some of the luxuries of modern living, especially at the very upper end.

    But, honestly this might all be a moot point, because modern life also seems to be dependent on an infinite growth paradigm and infinite growth isn’t possible, regardless of the energy source. It’s possible that humans just aren’t capable of living sustainably at these scales and at these levels of advancement. Sustainability requires that there be such a thing as “enough,” but is there such a thing as enough for most people? I don’t know.






  • Google’s temporary retreat on RISC-V is a good example of the kind of basic stumbling block that a new architecture faces on the road towards mainstream - the lack of a mature and unified ecosystem.

    I think RISC-V is positioned well to be the preferred architecture for an open ecosystem. But that’s not necessarily going to help it compete. If RISC-V is ever able to compete with Arm it will be because some company developed a chip based on a proprietary implementation of RISC-V, that is able to outperform Arm based offerings in some key way. Proprietary is just more profitable than open, so that’s where the money is going to go, and you need money to compete.

    That being said, I’m glad an open standard ISA like RISC-V exists.